A Swirl of Duality and Dueling Identities

You had to watch where you stepped as you entered Zoe/Juniper’s “BeginAgain Installed.” A thick layer of soil covered the floor of the cryptlike space at 3LD Art & Technology Center. Planted in the middle, sprouting out from one wall, was what looked like a massive glass chamber, a sort of triangular aquarium whose walls turned out to be both reflective and transparent. The floor inside was bare, more pristine than its outskirts. The audience sat on either side of this structure, two groups facing each other, just one of many mirror images that appeared over the next hour.

“BeginAgain Installed,” seen on Saturday, was the work of the choreographer Zoe Scofield, the visual artist Juniper Shuey and a substantial team of video, sound, lighting and set design collaborators. The Joyce Theater presented it offsite as part of the Joyce Unleashed festival. Based in Seattle, Ms. Scofield and Mr. Shuey have been making ambitious multimedia projects since 2005. In this one, a New York premiere, not all of those media — movement, projections and more — seemed necessary, sometimes obscuring more than informing one another. Amid a swirl of ideas about dual (and dueling) identities, about confronting and escaping from layers of the self, the viewer could feel much like the dancers looked: buffeted around this dark environment, ricocheting between moments of uncanny, luminous beauty and opaque confusion.

The two central, equally ravenous dancers, Ms. Scofield and Ariel Freedman, could be twins or different sides of the same person. They wore identical French braids and short dresses (by Christine Meyers), sheer gray with a blade of red cutting down the back. Their barbed, rangy movement — ballet steps wrangled into less identifiable forms — took them in and out of the chamber, which, sealed though it seemed, had apertures for coming and going. Their relationship was skeptical, tender, masochistic — contrasts captured in Julian Martlew’s sometimes growling, sometimes barely audible sound.

In a striking passage, Ms. Scofield, scrambling through the soil, repeatedly positioned herself under Ms. Freedman’s hovering foot, as if longing to be crushed. A third dancer, Annie Rigney, spent much of the work lying in the dirt, swathed in a partial body cast. Shedding that shell, she became a ghostly but manipulative figure.